#Language fluency doesn't happen overnight.
This book is about learning and teaching, and of course teaching is the facilitation of learning.
And a major step in learning how to facilitate is understanding the intricate web of principles that are spun
together to affect how and why people learn-or fail to learn-and L2.
Questions about SLA
Learner Characteristics (ethinic,linguistic,and religious heritage, native language, levels,socioeconomic
characteristics,intellectual capacities, abilities,strengths,weaknesses,personality..)
Linguistic factors (what is language?,언어에 대한이해, 언어시스템에 대한이해)
Learning Processes (학습이 어떻게 일어나는가? specific steps?mental or intellectual processes?
strategies? mental,emotional,and physical prossesses?)
Age and Acquisition
Classroom Instruction (natural environments, instructed, methodological approaches,textbooks,
materials,styles,teacher style, real world?...)
Context (secon language context? foreign language? artificial environment? interculural contrasts
similarities?)
Purpose (achievements of a successful career, identify closely with the culture?)
Rejoicing in our defeats
Answers must be framed in a context that can vary from one learner to another, and from one moment
to another. -> "It depends"
We can rejoice in our defeats because we know that it's the very elusiveness of the phenomenon of
SLA that makes the quest for answers so exciting.
Our field of inquiry is no simple, unidimensional reality. It's "slippery" in every way.
(As you consider the issues, chapter by chapter, you will develop an integrated understanding of how
people learn-and sometimes fail to learn-an L2)
The understanding must be eclectic.
No single theory or hypothesis will provide a magic formula for all learners in all contexts.
You will be urged to be as critical as you can in considering the merit of various models and theories
and research findings.
You'll have to be a bit cautious: don't accept every claim as truth just because someone fervently
asserts it to be factual.
By the end of the final chapter, with this cautious, enlightened, eclectic approach, you'll no doubt
surprise yourself on how many pieces of this giant puzzle you can actually put together.
a paradigm -an interlocking design, a model, or a theory of SLA.
Since this book is about language, learning, and teaching, let's see what happens when we try to define those three terms.
LANGUAGE
Your understanding of the components of language determines to a large extent how you teach a language.
if you believe that nonverbal communication is a key to successful second language learning, you will devote some attention in your curriculum to nonverbal systems and cues.
If you perceive language as a phenomenon that can be dismantled into thousands of discrete pieces-such as grammar points-and those pieces programmatically taught one by one, you will atatend carefully to an understanding of the discrete forms of language.
if you think language is essentially culural and interactive, your classroom mothodology will be imbued with sociolinguistic strategies and communicative tasks.
LEARNING AND TEACHING
A search in contemporary dictionaries reveals that learning is "acquiring knowledge of a subject or a skill by study, experience, or instruction"
an educational psychologist would define learning even more succintly as " a change in an individual caused by experience"
Similary, teaching, which is implied in the first definition of learning, may be defined as " showing or helping someone to learn how to do something, giving instructions, guiding in the study of something, providing with knolwege, causing to know or understand"
Learning is :
1. acquisition or "adding"
2. The retention of information or skills
3. The involvement of storage systems, memory, and cognitive organization
4. The application of active, conscious focus, and subconscious attention
5. Relatively permanent but subject to forgetting
6. The result of practice, perhaps reinforced practice
7. A change in behavior
These concepts can also give way to a number of subfields within the dscipline of psychology: acquisition processes, perception, memory (storage) system, short-and long-term memory, recall, motivation, conscious and subconscious attention, learning styles and strategies, theories of forgetting, reinforcement, the role of practice.
Very quickly the concept of learning becomes every bit as complex as the concept of language.
Yet the second language learner brings all these variables into play in the learning of a second language.
Teaching cannot be defined apart from learning. Teaching is guiding and facilitating learning, enabling a person to learn, and setting the conditions for learning,
Your understanding of how people learn will determine your philosophy of education, your teaching style, approach, lesson design, and classroom techniques.
If, Like B.F. Skinner, you look at learning as a process of operant conditioning through a carefully paced program of reinforcement, you will teach accordingly.
If you view second language learning as a deductive rather than an inductive process, you will probably choose to present rules, lists, and charts to your students rather than let them "discover" those rules inductively.
THREE PERSPECTIVES ON SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
Differning viewporints emerge from equally knowlegeable scholars, who usually differ over the extent to which one perspective is more accurate that another.
Yet with all the possible disagreements among applied lingusits and SLA researchers, some historical patterns emerge that highlight trends in the study of SLA. These trends will be described here in the form of three different perspectives, or schools of thought in the fields of linguistics and psychology.
1. Structural Linguistics and Behavioral Psychology
